Chapter 9: Creating Communities of Master Readers

Overview: Chapters 9 and 10 compose Part Three of the book, which is about reading apprenticeships "beyond the classroom"--mainly in professional training and in schoolwide programs. This chapter focuses on creating reading groups of teachers so that they can fully understand their own reading processes. By having their own reading communities, teachers can experience first-hand this sytem of classroom reading.

Themes and Messages

--Practicing strategic reading helps teachers understand how different students engage in reading inquiry. In addition, this ongoing professional training strengthens teachers' concepts of what they are doing and why when they teach in this style, helping them navigate the "reading wars" and the onslaught of suggestions and advice they receive.

--While teachers may read fluently in their own subject area, reading in other subject areas can help them identify stumbling blocks in the reading process that may also plague their students. (For example, science teachers knew the structure of scientific articles--what was essential and what could be skimmed--while English teachers read the whole article thoroughly and didn't always understand.)

--Engaging in this sort of strategic reading means that teachers have to expand their self-definition to include "reading teacher." This can change the way they manage their classrooms:
"When subject area teachers take on the role of master reader in their respective disciplines, their classrooms feel different. We find that teachers who have assumed this role spend more time working explicitly with texts and allocate more classroom time to reading and talking about reading. They become models of and copractitioners in the processes they want students to learn rather than stage-front instructors. Active inquiry into reading tends to raise the classroom noise level, but it also raises comprension. As students acquire the skills needed to become independent learners in a particular discipline, they ask more questions and have greater confidence in their own ability to construct meaning from texts." (167)

Strategies

--For subject-matter teachers to implement reading apprenticeships, they need to understand their own reading experiences. Thus, this chapter focused on strategies for professional development. Exploring reading in a community allows for more feedback and greater exploration, so working together is advised (though teachers can train individually if necessary). In the example scenarios, teachers might say out loud what they were thinking frequently while reading, causing them to articulate the reading process and get feedback on their process from others.

1. One sample development activity involved teachers reading from a short text that was difficult enough to challenge them. The ensuing conversation included dividing up their reading processes into four categories: fluency, motivation, cognition, and knowledge. By creating a chart of these activities, teachers have a visual representation of the "complexity of knowledge" (155).

2. The next activity, called "Think-Aloud Practice," requires participants to verbalize the entire reading process. Pairs of teachers work through a text (again, a complex text requiring reading engagement at this level)--one reads and the other states, out loud, what she is thinking about the text and how she is working on comprehend it.

3. "Close Reading": Teachers read several paragraphs of a text, then answer the questions "What do you think you know?" and "What in the text makes you think you know it?"

4. Disciplinary reading tricks are the focus of the fourth strategy, where "teachers in the same subject area all tackle the same challenging discipline-specific text" (163). First, they record their pre-reading expectations and predictions about the text. After ten minutes of reading, they respond in their journals to some questions about their reading process (e.g. "What questions, if any, were you asking as you read?") Teachers then analyze their notes--first individually, then in the group--to identify the specific processes they use to read in their disciplines. These notes can then be shared between disciplines to highlight differences.